Posts tagged Democrat
Cognitive Dissonance
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” - William S. Burroughs
Texas state senator's office firebombed
“Pro-life, these people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors, what kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do everything they can do save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?” — George Carlin
Or, apparently, a female Texas State Senator who fought against the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Luckily, no one was killed, but this is horrifying. From Fox 4 News:
The Fort Worth Fire Department is investigating an arson attack at State Sen. Wendy Davis’ legislative office.
Fire officials said just after 4 p.m. on Tuesday someone threw two Molotov cocktails into the third-floor office on West 7th Street. Two of Davis’ staff members were there at the time. They used a fire extinguisher to put out the waist-high flames. No one was hurt.
According to UPI:
Davis, a Democrat, played a high-profile role last week in arguing against plans by Texas state officials to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, saying such a move could deprive 130,000 Texas women of healthcare services including cancer screening and contraception.
This is not fucking funny. This past August, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas was firebombed. The McKinney, Texas clinic is less than one hour from Fort Worth. In January of this year, Donny Mower received five years in prison for firebombing a California Planned Parenthood Clinic and vandalizing a mosque in late 2010.
From Texas Right to Life:
Click on a dot, get all the info about the clinic, or “abortion mills” as they call them. The McKinney Clinic is still listed as open.
Texas Right to Life on Sen. Davis:
While the Pro-Life super majority has been a blessing, there were a select few who would stop at nothing to squelch the advances for Life. Most notably, Representative Jessica Farrar and Senator Wendy Davis were determined to stop all Pro-Life efforts.
Writer Robert Gieb at Catholic Lane calls Sen. Davis “a political handmaiden of the abortion industry which makes millions of dollars from killing weak and vulnerable human beings.” Gieb also writes:
“The state senator who represents the district in which I reside, Wendy Davis, is a most fervent supporter of killing the innocent unborn, and has been well compensated by the abortion industry, having received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the pro abortion group called Annie’s List, and both money and substantial in kind political advertising and telephone work from Planned Parenthood.”
When in the hell are we going to call these firebombings terrorism? When are we going to examine the heated rhetoric involved in calling a state senator a child murderer?
The entrance to the McKinney PP Clinic:
Sen. Davis’ door:
This is domestic terrorism. Period. It’s often religiously motivated. Bet you won’t hear Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney condemn it on the campaign trail — it’s just a feeling I have.
Sen. Davis’ staffers are very fortunate, and I hope the arsonist — the attempted murderer of innocent, already-born people — is brought to justice swiftly.
(Source: cognitivedissonance)
13 notes &
My coverage of the State of the Union address
Bonus tweets from the GOP response, and I (briefly) hopped aboard the Herman Cain train.
(Source: cognitivedissonance)
Rep. Barney Frank is a total BAMF
His latest interview with The New York Times is fantastic. An excerpt:
Interviewer: You’ve long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed?
Barney Frank: No.
Interviewer: Why not?
Barney Frank: Why do you ask a question, then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people?
Interviewer: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don’t smoke it.
Barney Frank: Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion?
(Source: cognitivedissonance)
The problem with selecting a candidate to “beat Obama”
MSNBC and Fox News are both hammering home that out of all the candidates in the GOP primary in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich’s support was the highest among people who said the most important factor in their selection was a candidate who could defeat Barack Obama. Coincidentally, beating Obama was the most important factor in candidate choice to nearly 50% of voters. Fox News is also pointing out his strong performances in debates with his zingers at the media and fellow candidates and his stubborn refusal to go gently into that good night as factors in his rise in the polls, and his overall victory in South Carolina.
Um, guys?
You know that after January 20, 2013, the president-elect is now the president. That means said president has to actually do shit. Things will not be magically fixed just because you voted out Barack Obama. In fact, much of what Gingrich wants to do in office could make things worse.
I imagine the thought process of many voters when considering Gingrich goes like this:
- Doughy white guy says shit I like. He sounds smart. He says he’s going to beat Obama. He sounds confident, unlike that sputtering asshat with tax problems. Plus, he’ll end Obama’s war on
myreligion. - Fuck the lazy-ass poor people. Get jobs, douchebags. He’ll even put kids to work, too.
- Open marriage? Shit, at least he could beat Obama.
- Vote Newt Gingrich.
- *POOF* Teatopia, y’all!
This is remarkably similar to liberal pals of mine who are pissed Obama didn’t unbreak everything in four years and bring about the opposite of Teatopia. If you listened to Obama and examined his voting record, you’d see he’s fairly moderate. In fact, compared to past Republicans, i.e. Richard Nixon, he’s more to the right.
But in the 2012 Electoral Race to the Bottom, sponsored by Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the facts don’t matter and Barack Obama must be defeated. Even if it means nominating a man with absolutely no character or ability to lead. Why is it so tough to wrap my brain around voters supporting Newt Gingrich?
- Speaking of the Citizens United decision, Gingrich Productions has “produced three films on religion and one each on energy, Ronald Reagan and the threat of radical Islam.” These films are little more than GOP talking point advertisements. Gingrich’s funding partner? As The Wall Street Journal points out, these were “all done as joint projects with the conservative activist group, Citizens United. The latest project: A film on American exceptionalism, another likely campaign theme.”
- He’s admitted to multiple affairs, while attacking others on “family values” and holding himself up as a moral paragon. His personal life is irrelevant until he begins throwing stones in his obviously glass house.
- He doesn’t use a racism dog-whistle so much as a racism air-raid siren. Gingrich defended his diatribe from the Jan. 16th GOP debate, which he launched into when Juan Williams asked him about the racial overtones of his comments regarding poor children lacking “work habits”, employing children as janitors in poor, urban neighborhoods, and the black community needing to demand food stamps versus paychecks. And how did he choose to defend this?
Newt Gingrich decided to attack Juan Williams, claiming on Friday, “I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.” So in order to defend himself against charges of racism, he essentially states Williams is lazy. Williams was the African-American man who had the audacity to ask him a tough question, and that does not seem to sit well with Newt several days later. - As a US House Representative, he kited twenty-two personal checks using the now-defunct House Bank, charges uncovered during the “Rubbergate” scandal - including a check for over $9,000 to the IRS. One of the whistleblowers on this scandal? Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn.
- He blasted colleagues for ties to lobbyists and corruption, yet Gingrich accepted a check from Employment Policies Institute lobbyist Richard B. Berman for $25,000. This particular check, supposedly given to Gingrich as a donation for a college course he was teaching, led former Rep. Ben Jones (D-Ga.) to demand an ethics investigation by the US House because the note attached to the contribution raised questions of possible criminal wrongdoing by suggesting Gingrich used his influence on behalf of the lobbyist at a 1993 congressional hearing.
The note stated in a postscript: “Newt - Thanks again for the help on today’s committee hearing.” The subsequent investigation into this charge, shady book deals, and other fundraising activity lead to over 80 ethics charges against Gingrich and a plea deal with an unprecedented $300,000 fine. Gingrich resigned as well.
A side note from Esquire on the ethics investigation: [Emphasis mine]
The House Ethics Committee started investigating GOPAC’s donations to his college class and caught him trying to hide his tracks by raising money through a charity for inner-city kids called the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. Another charity of his called Earning by Learning actually spent half its money supporting a former Gingrich staffer who was writing his biography… The Ethics Committee found him guilty of laundering donations through charities, submitting “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable” testimony, and making “an effort to have the material appear to be nonpartisan on its face, yet serve as a partisan, political message for the purpose of building the Republican party.”
And yes, it’s those same inner-city kids he wants to make janitors.
Gingrich is running what he claims to be a revolutionary campaign of ideas. Yet those ideas are little more than attacking fellow candidates, the media, and Barack Obama for issues ranging from corruption and immorality, to favoritism and anti-Americanism. Gingrich employs a set of cliches and fiery debate invective that gets voters in the booth on primary day as evidenced by South Carolina. Can he continue this into the general election?
As multiple news outlets discussed today, Gingrich’s unfavorability rating is the highest of any candidate among moderates and independents. This is a significant voting bloc the GOP will seek to court from Obama. Gingrich is not stupid. He is effective in debates. He calls other candidates “Washington elites” (when he spent significantly more time in Washington than any other candidate running) and the crowd goes wild.
Mitt Romney, the ostensible front-runner, is a terrible candidate in debates. He is easily rattled and incapable of answering a direct question. The GOP field is in disarray and looking for unity. The former Speaker of the House is an experienced politician - though divisive - and may be the one to watch going into Super Tuesday in the next several weeks. Perhaps a theory posited by Gingrich in 1988 explains his success: “In every election in American history, both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.”
The 2012 primary season promises to be a dog and pony show until the bitter end - or until the money runs out. This election cycle reinforces the idea that American politics is little more than contemporary bread and circuses, only less bread and more circuses. Elections are ideally about issues and governance. This year, the only stated mission of the GOP is to rid the White House of Obama, and Gingrich is the candidate best at smearing Obama as somewhere between Benedict Arnold and Benito Mussolini.
Voters are responding well in the primary to this kind of messaging, but the GOP will hopefully discover it’s difficult to run on a platform of needing to do nothing besides regain control of the presidency. To run on a platform that consists of “beat the other guy and BAM! TEATOPIA!” is simply intellectually dishonest. But if it’s intellectually (and morally) dishonest they want, the GOP has their man in Gingrich. If it’s beat Obama they want, they may get it. However, January 21, 2013 and every day after is another day Obama will no longer be available as the executive target, and another day when the new president will be expected to lead. The GOP may be content to run a cliche-machine, powered by egomaniacal bile, but American voters deserve more than just some guy nominated to beat Obama.
(Source: cognitivedissonance)
57 notes &
BREAKING: Nebraska Democratic Senator Ben Nelson To Retire
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) is set to announce on Tuesday that he will retire in 2012, a Democratic source has confirmed to TPM.
Nelson was already probably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent going into 2012, and Republicans and GOP-aligned groups were already advertising against him.
Holding this seat could be difficult for Democrats, as the state voted 57%-42% for John McCain in 2008, and has not voted Democratic for president since the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide.
Nelson’s retirement was first reported by Politico.
Considering he was more Republican than Democrat, I’m not too broken up by this. However, Nebraskans should be careful they don’t wind up with a Tea Party acolyte.
37 notes &
“He is the tallest building in Wichita.”
Newt Gingrich, welcome to the top of the pack.
After Herman Cain’s rapid ascent, journalists everywhere turned their poison pens to the new GOP frontrunner. We detailed Cain’s trip through the press wringer here.
Now, it’s Gingrich’s turn.
That first quote is from this POLITICO piece where other brainy conservatives take the former Speaker’s intellectual bona fides down a peg.
Then there are these two pieces, one from iWatch News and one from POLITICO, that delve into Gingrich’s work as a
lobbyistadvocate in his think tank and two for-profit groups which raked in $100 million in revenue over the last decade.While Gingrich has vowed he was never a lobbyist, one conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute - where Gingrich once held a post - notes that “if I were to write a Wikipedia definition of lobbying it might not be all that different from their description” while adding that Gingrich’s enterprises “may have avoided lobbying members face to face.”
That’s in addition to Bloomberg’s widely-reported findings of Gingrich’s work for favored conservative punching bag (and government-sponsored mortgage behemoth) Freddie Mac, which netted him $1.6 million over several years.
And that’s all before he raised a decidedly non-GOP mainstream opinion (at least among the other candidates) about immigration in last night’s debate. Fox News called the following “Newt’s Big Risk”:
“I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter century — who have children and grandchildren, who are members of the community, who may have done something 25 years ago — separate them from their families, and expel them. … I don’t see how the — the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century. And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying: Let’s be humane in enforcing the law — without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.”
Keep your eyes peeled for long-form stories about Gingrich’s background over the next several weeks. It will be key to determining whether the candidate can hold up while his record comes under intense scrutiny.
What’s the value of such scrutiny? Isn’t this just digging up old skeletons? Isn’t the future more important? In some sense, yes. But as Mitt Romney is dogged with every day, voters are often as concerned - and rightly so - with what candidates have done in their past, not what they say they’ll do in the future.
Go beyond:
- Curious about Newt? Check out his schedule to see if he’ll be at an event near you.
- Missed last night’s debate? Read the transcript here.
- Read Coginitive Dissonance’s postmortem of last night’s debate.
An interesting analysis of Newt Gingrich, a man who’s a legend in his own mind.
In response to bill to drug-test welfare recipients, Ohio Democrat proposes testing lawmakers
An Ohio Democratic lawmaker is proposing to drug-test elected officials, in response to a Republican-backed bill calling for drug-testing of welfare recipients.
Rep. Robert Hagan’s bill would require statewide officeholders, legislators, members of Gov. John Kasich’s jobs board and recipients of federal bailout money to pay for their testing for un-prescribed pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs and alcohol. Officials testing positive would have to undergo treatment or be booted from office.
Hagan says it’s hypocritical for lawmakers to say they’re protecting taxpayer money by testing welfare recipients for drugs if they themselves won’t submit to testing.
Well, well, well… isn’t this just marvelous? Of course, I’d prefer not drug-testing welfare recipients, but let’s make it more equitable, shall we? He suggested anyone who receives taxpayer dollars should be tested if welfare recipients are tested - simple as that. Let us not forget how drug-testing folks applying for welfare turned out for Florida…
Oh, and he supports the Occupy Movement. He spoke at Occupy Youngstown:
“Wall Street started the war, and we the people will finish it,” Rep. Robert Hagan of Youngstown told a fired-up crowd.
BAMF credentials established, sir.
Make a list… Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.
Mike Huckabee, encouraging voter suppression this Friday in Mason, Ohio.
He was speaking in support of Issue 2. Issue 2 is the ballot referendum on Senate Bill 5, the bill in Ohio that stripped collective bargaining rights. Enough signatures were gathered to put SB 5 on the ballot as Issue 2.
A ‘yes’ vote means the voter supports SB 5 and Issue 2. A ‘no’ vote means the voter does not support SB 5 and Issue 2. So if you don’t support it, and you’re the relative of someone who does, Mike Huckabee thinks said relative should keep you from voting.
Thought experiment: What if a Democrat said this? What if Howard Dean said this at a fundraiser? Fox News would have a collective aneurysm. Instead, Huckabee’s comments are defended as “just a joke” online. Gotcha.
(Source: masonbuzz.com)
I don’t know, but I expect the wealthy to write a check ’cause it’s as bad as it’s ever been. It would be unpatriotic not to try to save the country. I’m sure people will bitch about it, but if it meant we get to operate in this country and live here another day, then so be it.
One way or another, before it’s over they’re gonna have to come and take big money from the earners and big corporations to save the country. I’m sure that everybody that has a patriotic cell in their system will say, ‘If it’s gotta be done, it’s gotta be done.’ I’d rather live here and not have as much money than live anywhere else and have twice as much.
Toby Keith, on taxing the rich and corporations.
Yes, that Toby Keith who wrote the “We’re gonna put a boot in your ass” song and who you would assume is a Republican through and through.
He’s a Democrat.
Maybe if he puts this in a catchy song, the red states will take notice, along with their congressmen. I might just play Toby Keith on my radio show if he were to do that.
Somehow, I’d forgotten he was a Democrat… Write that song, Toby Keith. I’ll play it in Wyoming.
(Source: addictinginfo.org)
45 notes &
Republican women fight every day for the women who can’t start a business because of burdensome taxes and regulations, for the women who worry that we are capping their children’s future and trading it to China in exchange for cheap loans, for the women who deserve to make their own health-care choices and for this year’s young women graduates who are entering a job market stagnated by Washington-driven uncertainty. It’s disappointing that Democrats would rather call names and use such divisive language than find areas where we can work together on behalf of American women and families.
Republican congresswomen responding in an open letter to DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who said it’s difficult to understand how the GOP can be so “anti-woman.”
I put one statement in bold because it’s rather telling: There are some women who deserve to make their own health care choices, and others who do not. Those who do not include women like me, who use Planned Parenthood as the main source for preventative care. Or women who seek an abortion, particularly after being raped - they should have thought ahead, much like carrying a spare tire in your car. It must also include elderly women who wish to have Medicare protected. Or how about single moms relying on Medicaid, CHIP, Free Clinics, and WIC to keep themselves and their children healthy - all programs on the chopping block - don’t they deserve to make their own health care choices? Without these services, many women are forced into having no choice or say in their health care, because they simply won’t receive any health care.
Let’s not even mention their non-support of the Lilly Ledbetter act, attempts to redefine rape, etc… Do they even pay attention to how ludicrous this letter sounds? Do they listen to themselves talk?
(Source: dailycaller.com)
7 notes &
I will miss Rep. Alan Grayson. He’s been a progressive champion. Here, he outlines what the rich can buy with the extra money they’ll have if we extend the Bush tax cuts.
Grey Poupon?
14 notes &
The tagline: Your own personal stimulus package. It’s the Obamarator and it’s exactly what you think it is.
I was thinking about using the Google to see if there’s a Republican counter, something like the Dick Cheney butt plug, but I’m pretty sure I’d start screaming, “I need an adult!”
2 notes &
The craziest Tea Party candidates are great for Democrats. The math bears it out. So, Democrats in Pennsylvania figured it was a good idea to help a crazy Tea Party Birther get on the ballot to play the spoiler.
Jim Schneller is a Birther who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest. And, according to a Reuters report, Democrats are directly responsible for getting him on the ballot in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional district race. People connected to the local Democratic Party and their candidate, Bryan Lentz, collected around 4,813 signatures to get Schneller on the ballot. (He only needed 4,000.) The chairwoman of the local Democratic party collected 503 herself!
Imagine these die-hard Democrats knocking on doors and trying to feign enthusiasm for Schneller’s pledge to abolish the Fed! (Maybe dressing in revolutionary garb to complete the illusion?) But the best part about this story is that Schneller didn’t even realize what was going on until the night he turned in his own signatures and found a bunch of strangers there as well. “I can see how it might look to some people that I was part of some conspiracy,” Schneller told Reuters. “But I was the victim of a conspiracy.”
As much as this made me giggle, shit like this will backfire at some point.
1 note &
If you’re on Facebook…
Andrew Simons for Secretary of State
This is my fiancé’s page. He’s running for Secretary of State in Wyoming as a Democrat. Truly grassroots. Visit it, click like, and invite your friends. Seriously, it won’t take you long…
